Monday, September 7, 2015

Five Non-homo Reasons You Shouldn't Stand With Kim Davis That Have Nothing To Do With Race

The latest topic of conservative political fodder is the arrest and detainment of a certain Kentucky-based ex-clerk Kim Davis, who has allegedly been unfairly persecuted and harangued for expressing her profound, “religious” conviction that marriage is a holy union between a man and a woman. Davis has risen to a sort of stardom among conservatives and especially among such presidential backrunners as Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, and Mike Huckabee, the last of whom called her evidence of the “criminalization of Christianity in our country”, but Davis is not a conservative, nor do I think she’s a very good Christian. Has conservatism entered such a rut of cultural influence that its proponents must resort to idolizing fake conservatives and creating pat, imitatively cutsey pound signs like #ImWithKim and #IStandWithKimDavis in order to stay relevant?

Unlike Huckabee and Cruz and so many others, I don’t pound sign stand with Kim Davis, not because I’m not a conservative, but because I abide by conservatism in its most essential, undiluted form. More than just a philosophical or legislative doctrine consisting of various policy positions, real conservatism is a way of life, a behavioral disposition that governs all its adherents’ actions and statements. Part of being a conservative is taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions, reaping both the good and bad fruits of your labor, which is why we conservatives don’t like the welfare state, crony capitalism, or socialism in general. True conservatives don’t have to take the fall for their mistakes that often because true conservatives know exactly what they want, why they want it, and what it will effect. True conservatives don’t need a cabinet of advisors or spokeskids to make their choices and speeches for them because they have common sense and logical reasoning and can usually deduce what’s best for themselves. True conservatives don’t really need to look at the R or the D label on the voting guide, although they’re often helpful, because they’ll already be well acquainted with each candidate’s intentions and know which one is most suited (or least destructive) to the proper ends of government.

Kim Davis is not a true conservative, and she’s certainly not given to researching a politician’s values before she gives him her moral support. In so far as she considers herself a woman of God dedicated to protecting real marriage, she’s not a very pious Christian either. Kim Davis is a member of the Democrat party – see the photo above –, and as such she only has herself to blame, not merely for the country’s current marriage debacle, but for our broader epidemic of amorality, which spans racial segregation, subjugation of religious liberty to imagined “compelling needs”, tens of millions of dismembered babies, and, most recently, the eradication of traditional, scientific conceptions of sexuality in support of a radical electioneering agenda. By virtue of her identification with the Democrats, Davis has aligned herself with and condoned a noble lineage of godly people including Jonathan Edwards, Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Woodrow Wilson, Robert Byrd, Barney Frank, and so on and so forth. What was she expecting to happen when she threw in her vote for Barack Hussein Obama, possibly twice? Surely she didn’t think that empowering such an ideologue, who gets most of his moral positions from his daughters at the dinner table and who uses every mass shooting perpetrated by a Muslim to sing the praises of the peaceful faith of Islam, would render the American political landscape more friendly to religious independence and practice? Did she somehow believe that electing Obama would lead to a more conservative, constitutionally reverent Supreme Court? Was she blind when filling out her ballot? Did she really care at all about who would occupy potentially the most powerful office of the land?

So why have all the Republican candidates excepting Trump and Fiorina and Carson and Rand flocked to the defense of this “heroic” woman, who obviously isn’t one of their own, being a low-information voter, isn’t a martyr in any meaningful sense of the word, and represents the most obnoxious form of insubordination by a public worker? Davis epitomizes every disrespectable trait a conservative should aspire not to exercise: she’s irrational, ideologically inconsistent, and strikingly indifferent towards the rule of law. Assuming for the sake of argument that the Supreme Court has the constitutional authority to “legalize” homosexual marriage in all fifty states (it does not), Davis cannot pick and choose which “laws” she follows, nor can she claim a religious exemption because she’s already sold her soul to be a worker for the government. She bases her refusal to sign the documents on the sincere belief that homosexual unions are “not of God”, but are opposite-sex marriage documents filled out by her office any more of God? A marriage license issued by the government has nothing to do with God; it’s a piece of paper denoting a secular, legal status bestowed by potentially godless people upon other potentially godless people in a transaction that has no religious implications and can be revoked at any time.

One of the few Bible stories generally known by anyone who hasn’t read the Bible is Jesus telling the Pharisees and Herodians, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and give to God what is God’s.” This was a really clever retort, firstly because it stumped the enemies of Jesus who were seeking to ensnare him and secondly because it illustrated a distinction between civil goods and dues, which are owed to Caesar, and spiritual goods, which are owed to God. The denarius in our time is the marriage license (ponder that language for a moment, that a homosexual marriage document is no more transcendent or spiritual than a license to drive), and Anthony Kennedy is Caesar, but to listen to Kim Davis, one would think she’s filling out a job application for the heavenly kingdom. Davis’ empty, vain, and self-indulgent protest is not the fulfillment of the 1st amendment because there isn’t any cause or sense behind it. It’s just protest for the sake of protesting, serving also to fool less perceptive people into thinking she had nothing to do with societal ills she herself has continually helped to instigate.

Should Kim Davis have been placed behind bars on taxpayer support simply for not doling out printed certificates of “marriage” to people who want the satisfaction of hearing that they’re married from someone else’s mouth? No. Hurting someone’s dignity or feelings is just a really petty warrant to waste a lot of money incarcerating someone who has posed no tangible, quantifiable burden to the rest of society. At the same time, couldn’t one say that she is getting exactly the treatment she deserves, poetic justice of sorts for voting in the fascist circus freaks she did? Did she ask for anything less?

But Kim Davis isn’t the problem with the American democratic system, nor does her imprisonment mark the first and most perturbing breach of religious liberty in our nation’s 400-year history. The problem with American democracy is all the robotic, brainless politicians who should know better than to make a saint or hero of Kim Davis but victimize her anyway because certain talking points are so programmed into their dialect they see no other safe and viable way of addressing such a hot button issue. The problem with American democracy is that we continually focus on distractions like Kim Davis instead of things that really matter, e.g. the record number of unemployed people in this country, the freaking Hillary Clinton email scandal, or the ongoing exposé of a dystopian human-harvesting project being waged by a recipient of some half a billion dollars in government aid.

None of those are of the Lord, but none of those have raised the slightest indignation from Miss Davis.

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Cote Keller

My name here is Mr. Author, but some people call me Cote. I consider myself laconic in speech, Mere Christian in faith, and quasi-Randian, classically liberal, borderline libertarian, rule-of-law radical for federalism in politics. The purpose of these files is to expound what such a person believes and why.